Italy’s enduring president

The Italian government is stumbling, and if Romano Prodi is forced to resign, the president of the republic, Giorgio Napolitano, will have the key role. The grand old man is the embodiment of Italian post-war history.

Almost everything in Giorgio Napolitano’s long career is worthy of note. He was born in Naples in 1925, and joined the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in 1945, remaining a member of all its successor organisations. From the mid-1960s he was a member of the top leadership. He was a deputy in the Italian parliament between 1953 and 1963, and again between 1968 and 1996. Between 1996 and 1998 he was minister of the interior in the first Prodi government, and a member of the European parliament. He has been president of Italy since May 2006.

Napolitano represents continuity in a country whose recent history is a series of disjointed leaps. A Neapolitan with Prussian reserve; a communist who feels more a man of institutions than a representative of the people; a professional parliamentarian for more than half a century. It is a consistent biography, but puzzling. How did he become a communist? And how could a former communist become president of the republic in the Silvio Berlusconi era?

As a 20-year-old law student he became a communist “for moral and cultural reasons”. In 1945 communist cadres in Italy, especially the south, were rare. The PCI leadership came from exile in Moscow and from prison. In the north many young people were drawn to the party during the partisan uprising towards the end of the second world war. After the liberation the party transformed itself into a “party of a new type” and opened up to young people inspired by the call to build a new state and a new society, combat hunger and entrenched social repression (not only in the south), and establish democratic conditions that would eventually lead to a socialist order – with or without a revolutionary uprising.

The years 1945-7 were marked by the struggle for the republic and a constitution. For example, in the referendum of 2 June 1946 most of the south voted for the monarchy – the city of Naples by an overwhelming majority. Only northern votes secured a narrow victory for a republic. When the Naples communists, celebrating the republic at their party headquarters, raised alongside the red flag the republican tricolour without the Savoy coat of arms, an angry crowd stormed the building. The participants would have been lynched had the police, reinforced by former partisans, not intervened; 10 people, mostly lumpen proletarians, were killed in the fighting.

After this, the party organised summer holidays with families in central and northern Italy for more than 1,000 children from Naples: a clear example of the “moral and cultural reasons” that compelled thousands (often, like Napolitano, from the best families) to join the party. They wanted a social and political learning process through contact with other social strata; ideology was secondary. For young people starved intellectually by fascism, Marx and Gramsci were more interesting than Pius XII and Benedetto Croce (a politician and philosopher whom the communists then treated with respect).

Mentors and forebears

Napolitano’s mentor was Giorgio Amendola (1907-80), whose father, a well-known liberal politician, had led the parliamentary opposition to Mussolini for as long as that was possible. Amendola Jnr was a close colleague of the party leader, Palmiro Togliatti, and embodied the contradictions of the party of a new type. Using Stalinist methods, he persecuted every manifestation of opposition as “party splitting” and denounced any social protest not controlled by the party as anarchist or extremist. For a functionary like Amendola, the tie with the Soviet Union was indispensable: as late as 1980 he opposed the party’s condemnation of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Yet Amendola was the most determined advocate of dialogue with other political forces, especially the Socialists and Social Democrats. In the 1970s he was also a convinced supporter of European unification. After the death of Togliatti in 1965 he surprisingly proposed a merger of the Communist, Socialist and Social-Democratic parties, arguing that the two great wings of the European labour movement had failed to deliver the goods. Only together could they overcome the crisis. The proposal came to nothing and what Amendola expected of it is still a puzzle.

In the 1970s, as leader of the Communist group in the European parliament, Napolitano tried to push Amendola’s rapprochement with European social democracy. Closer contacts with the parties of Willy Brandt, Olof Palme or Bruno Kreisky seemed the only way to overcome international resistance to PCI participation in government, and the US veto.

Immediately after the coup in Chile on 11 September 1973, PCI party leader Enrico Berlinguer proposed to the Christian Democrats a historic compromise between the two great popular parties. The US foreign minister Henry Kissinger, who had pulled the strings behind the Chilean putsch, protested strongly to the Italian prime minister, Aldo Moro. In the summer of 1975 the PCI’s short-lived euro-communist strategy was launched. The aim was to emphasis European communists’ independence of the Soviet Union, which the PCI had been openly criticising since the invasion of Czechoslovakia.

In the 1976 elections the PCI increased its share of the poll by 7%, to 34.4%, while the Christian Democrats (with 38.7%) and their Socialist coalition partners (with 8.6%) marked time. It was difficult to exclude from government, as a matter of principle, a party that had won a third of the votes and represented the most active political sectors of the population. A solution had to be found to Italy’s blocked democracy, under which the main opposition party never governed. The failure to do so was decisive in the subsequent demise of all the competing parties. The Communists, Socialists and Christian Democrats all quietly dissolved their parties between 1991 and 1994. The country slid into a second republic and woke up in May 1994 in the hands of Berlusconi.

Euphoria

In 1976 the PCI was euphoric at the prospect of imminent participation in government. Berlinguer told enthusiastic crowds that Italy had never been so close to a decisive move towards socialism. In parliament Napolitano committed the Communist group to a new kind of opposition: preventive cooperation in legislative initiatives whose main features were to be agreed with the government and amended in committee so as to allow the Communists to vote in favour or at least abstain. This led in 1976 to the formation of Giulio Andreotti’s government of “non-mistrust” of the Communists.

This was followed, after the assassination of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades, by a government of national solidarity, again under Andreotti, which acted in concert with the Communists, who were not included in the government. The historic compromise was replaced by small steps. The Communists, confident in the strength of their support, believed time was on their side. But in the end Andreotti’s saying – “power wears down those who want it but don’t have it” – proved true. In January 1979 Berlinguer released himself from the oppressive embrace of the Christian Democrats.

Many questions remain about this period. In his autobiography Dal PCI al socialismo europea (From the PCI to European socialism, Laterza, Rome, 2005), Napolitano draws up a positive balance sheet: the involvement of the Communists brought major reforms in public health, housing, urban planning and regional funding. Institutional reforms, especially reform of parliament, curbed the power of the Christian Democrats, who had previously treated the state as a family affair. Rightwing and leftwing terrorism was combated effectively. The economy was stabilised after the 1973 oil crisis and the 1975 recession, and integration of the Italian economy in the European Community was successful despite inflation rates sometimes in double figures.

What price did the Italian Communists pay for this? The party spoke officially of a political exchange: sacrifices and wage restraint by the working class in exchange for recognition of its leadership role. The party saw itself on a long march into the institutions, which were in need of reform but were recognised as an indispensable framework for democracy and freedom. That required uncompromising opposition not only to any attempt at revolution, but to any propaganda in its favour, and especially to armed struggle. The PCI was prepared to collaborate in anti-liberal measures. In practice that led to the active combating and criminalisation of all political initiatives that could not be filtered through a democratic party or trade union.

Napolitano’s position in his autobiography had been taken earlier by Amendola in his polemics against the 1968 movement and autonomous workers’ struggles. After the emergence of the Red Brigades the whole party swung over to that line. That meant that there could be no dialogue with the 1977 movement, and the party found itself isolated both from rebellious youth and from liberal intellectuals. (In the 10 years up to 1977 the growing rift between the politically conscious masses and the party made any left alternative implausible.) For Napolitano and the group of reformists around him, slogans such as revolution, the third path and the overcoming of capitalism were ideological ballast that was evidence of disorientation. It seemed to them that the march into the institutions which they advocated could be achieved only through thorough pragmatism and with light ideological baggage.

Without a strategy

In early 1979, when Berlinguer revoked national solidarity and declared the historic compromise a failure, the party was for the first time without a strategy. In the 1979 election it lost 4% and by 1987 its share of the vote had fallen to 26.6%. Napolitano criticised revocation of the former party line but welcomed Berlinguer’s alternative approach of an understanding with the Socialists. Bettino Craxi (1934-2000) had become the Socialist Party strongman. He was an extremely clever tactician and an ambitious politician, soon to become prime minister and the first political sponsor of Berlusconi. He manoeuvred his party into a position of strength where it could tip the balance between the Christian Democrats, whose methods for holding on to power he adopted and modernised, and the Communists, whom he attacked in the name of libertarian socialism.

Convicted of corruption, Craxi moved to Tunisia in 1994. In his last speech to parliament in 1992 he challenged any colleague who had never accepted an illegal payment to stand up. The parliament had become a cesspool, and the judiciary’s summary action to clean it out led to the end of the First Republic.

Berlinguer must have sensed the imminent collapse of the system in 1981, when he called the ethical issue the central problem of Italian politics, declaring that “the political parties have colonised the state and all its institutions”. But the Communists, he said, were different: their frugal lifestyle was an answer to consumerism and corruption. When Berlinguer died unexpectedly in 1984, his funeral was the largest political rally in the history of the party. Millions felt it was the end of an era. In the elections to the European parliament shortly afterwards, the Communists polled 33.3%, beating the Christian Democrats for the first and last time. Then came the end.

On 9 November 1989, the day the Berlin Wall came down, Napolitano was in a political discussion with Willy Brandt. Once again, the issue was PCI membership in the Socialist International, which it finally joined in September 1992 after dissolving itself to become the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS). Berlinguer had already made the decisive break with the Soviet Union, and Achille Occhetto, then general secretary of the PCI, waited only three days after the fall of the Wall to announce major changes.

Napolitano was on Occhetto’s side, although he found the haste suspicious and the ensuing year-long debate contradictory and confused. The PDS was founded in February 1991, leaving Communist Refoundation as a rump communist party. In 1998, the name and symbol were changed again, with the foundation of the SD (Left Democrats). In October 2007 the SD became the Democratic Party (PD).

Lack of courage

Many critics see this repeated transformation as a marketing strategy, and the lack of content of subsequent party programmes makes the need for a new wrapper understandable. Napolitano was not so wrong in 1990 when he criticised the PCI for lacking the courage to declare itself a reformist social-democratic party and publicly become what it had already been for years. In his view, this was a waste of the party’s ideological heritage and would lead to zigzagging between left and right positions, and to the psychodrama of repression and nostalgia that afflicts present-day leftwing politics.

Is Napolitano the party’s spiritual heir? A man who became a communist out of decency and remained incorruptible throughout a political career of 60 years is a happy exception in the present dilapidated state of Italian public life. Napolitano has a traditional view of decency, far removed from the motivation of Berlinguer. During the great cleanup from 1992 to 1994, when politicians were being arrested every day, Napolitano, as speaker of the chamber of deputies, defended parliamentarians and parliamentary rights while supporting the judiciary and condemning the call for an amnesty. For him, the proper functioning and equilibrium of such delicate institutions was democracy’s highest good.

Napolitano acted accordingly as interior minister in the first Prodi government: always seeking balance and with no great urge to uncover the political conspiracies and crimes of the secret services and other organs of the state. That disappointed many, but it was realistic. For Napolitano, the struggles of the communists from 1950 to 1970 had enabled Italy to develop the institutions of a modern democracy. Can one expect such a man – in his position and in Italy’s present political situation – to question those institutions, point out their limitations and identify the reasons for their corruption?

Peter Kammerer

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Translated by Barry Smerin

Peter Kammerer is professor of sociology at the University of Urbino, Italy